A Million Dollar Minute: Helping Online Communities Help Each Other to Help You

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the presidential campaigns were using online social networks to give the appearance of listening to stakeholders. Baratunde Thurston wrote a great response — complete with diagrams — and brought up many important points.

One of those points outlined how candidates “listen” to constituents online by raising money:

Again, politicians are at the top of the heap, this time tapping into millions of small donors. Obama is the king of this right now. At this phase, politicians enable donors to solicit from other donors with their own mini-campaigns and donation widgets. This is significant, as it threatens the big time financial interests who’ve long held the ear (and balls) of our elected officials.

Here’s his diagram:

But both of our posts overlooked a key piece of this fundraising phenomenon, which might look something like this:

As Baratunde noted, Obama is dominating in the small donations category. He’s had a record-breaking 1 million individual donors to his campaign. His website is also ideally poised to enable his supporters to raise money for him, creating their own portals at MyBarackObama.com and rolling their own fundraising campaigns.

New York filmmaker and photographer Scott Cohen decided to use this capability to build something innovative: An Obama Minute. The idea was to encourage 10,000 people to give $100 each to the campaign at an appointed hour. The movement was picked up by other Obama supporters online, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which has been pimping the initiative on its website.

The jury is still out on just how much this campaign will raise. But no matter the outcome, the Obama campaign is to be congratulated for creating the fertile soil in which these kinds of grassroots efforts can grow. In my first post on this subject, I wrote about the five major goals of online community building as outlined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in Groundswell:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

The fundraising tools at MyBarackObama.com are a great example of #4: helping your community members to support one another, and help you in the process.

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